Gender identity ideology requires the erasure of sex as a basis for hard-won legal protections, the nullification of female sports categories, and even the rendering senseless of that old EU favourite: “women on boards” sex-based quotas. But perhaps most importantly, European parents have come to learn that the ideology dictates that childhood gender distress is a permanent characteristic that requires surgery and a lifetime of drugs.
Mess with people’s kids and all bets are off. But cementing this belief system in law and policy has remained a mission of EU bureaucrats and their relentless activist collaborators for at least a decade, particularly via an NGO called ILGA-Europe. You just don’t hear that much about it.
This secrecy is by design — it’s also why the mission is likely to succeed.
Indeed, the centrepiece of ILGA’s campaign for EU parliament elections last year was a pledge asking candidates to agree to keep their work on LGBTIQ issues secret. More than a thousand potential candidates signed, a scandalous revelation that was ignored by the Brussels political press.
ILGA-Europe have plenty of money for such slick advocacy campaigning; the organisation has received at least €21 million since 2014 from the EU itself, while its sister association, the Geneva-based ILGA-World, received a whopping €68 million from the EU budget in the same period.
There are a number of ways in which the EU spreads gender identity ideology. One of the most successful methods will be familiar to anyone on the gender beat: changing the meaning of words.
GBV is a very broad term, as it “affects people of all genders”. In other words, gender-based violence can be committed by anyone against anyone, and unless specified, says nothing about who the victim is. In short, it has nothing to do with women (though that doesn’t stop legislators using it to brag about their feminist bona fides).
Conversion therapy seems, on the surface, like an easy one. Who wouldn’t want to ban pray-away-the-gay torture? Again, language trickery is at play. Trying to weed out the reasons why a teenage girl might want a surgeon to remove her breasts, still less suggesting that it’s a symptom of anything other than being in the wrong body, would be criminalised by such a law.
Ultimately, there are two outcomes to conversion therapy: therapists will avoid taking gender-distressed people as patients, or worse, other therapists will actually trans away the gay.
There are other more discrete ways that the policy and legal work of the EU is being “queered”, from “mainstreaming” of LGBTIQ policies in unrelated work streams, to the staff association bragging about their membership of the same activist NGO that lobbies them. Some ILGA activists even bag top cabinet positions.
The sheer amount of cash promised for projects to promote gender identity ideology is mind boggling — and always wrapped up in noble and vague human rights language. As of last year, the EU has even begun to fund projects that will explicitly counter any opposition.
All this is in comparison with zero money on the “other side”, the side that cares for the privacy, safety and dignity of women and children, and the right of gays and lesbians to grow up whole.
